


the second hand unwinds

by dysprositos



Series: It Hasn’t Been My Day, My Week, My Month, Or Even My Decade [1]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Drinking, Gen, Rituals, Time Travel, getting smashed, smashing clocks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-10
Updated: 2020-06-10
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:01:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24652750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dysprositos/pseuds/dysprositos
Summary: It was one of those days in which you wished the timeline would open up and swallow everyone’s memory of the day whole.
Series: It Hasn’t Been My Day, My Week, My Month, Or Even My Decade [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1782421
Kudos: 18





	the second hand unwinds

Last night, you got drunk. Pissed. Wasted. Sloshed. Utterly sozzled. 100% blotto. To be fair, you’d earned it, or, more specifically, you’d needed it. Drinking to forget is a perfectly viable defense mechanism that, in small doses, is safe, healthy, and effective. No real side effects except for the cost, the hangover, and the occasional bizarre online-shopping impulse purchase, and more importantly while you’re drunk it’s as if the horrible events of the horrible day never happened. Best thing for it until they invent time travel. (Something about that thought tugs on a thread of your memory of last night.)

You fix yourself a hangover cure, take a shower, mope around feeling sorry for yourself all morning, and then around noon you have a delivery. You buzz the delivery people up to your flat with a mix of dread and resignation.

You have a drinking problem. Not a problem with drinking, such as, drinking too much too often. No, the problem is that when you have enough sheets to the wind you—not as infrequently as you’d like—make ill-advised online purchases that are rarely returnable and never useful. And your friends, drunk as they are by that point, invariably encourage this.

As box after box is piled in your living room, you check your bank account and find it about 500 pounds lighter—not something you can’t afford at all, but certainly cutting into your discretionary spending for the next few months if you can’t return... whatever this is. And you suspect, as the return labels have the name of some kind of wholesaler supply company, you cannot.

Finally, the last box has been brought in, all of them the same size and shape, the same return label, the same order number. One hundred boxes in all. With considerable trepidation, you open one. It is full of cheap-looking watches—36 of them, according to the manifest—and last night comes flooding back.

One of your colleagues, who works in Artifact Storage, had brought to drinking night a copied page from an allegedly spooky misprinted clock manual. The diagrams throughout the manual were exactly as expected, but the text had been replaced with excerpts from the philosophy work Being and Time, except for the page your coworker had copied and passed around your table.

This page instead described a ritual, purporting to enable the user, if the ritual was completed successfully, to travel back in time. Any person who tried it would only get one shot to complete it, and as it required smashing one timepiece during the noon hour every single day for 10 years straight, and then (after traveling back in time) killing and consuming the flesh of the user’s paradox double (to anchor the change in timeline), it seemed very unlikely to have been performed successfully very often. You’d all joked about it a bit. Who would have the time? the inclination? or over 3600 timepieces?

Of course, you had declared that you were going to do it. And now, with the copy of the ritual in your jacket pocket, exactly 3600 nonreturnable cheap watches in your living room, and the residual embarrassment from the terrible events of yesterday pre-drinking, it seems like a not-entirely-foolish idea. After all, what else are you going to do with all these watches? You don’t plan to become a watch salesperson.

And so, ever a creature of routine, you begin packing a couple watches and a ball-peen hammer in your lunchbox, and take up a new lunch break habit. The midday watch-smash actually is honestly kind of cathartic. And, even after you leave your stressful job at the Institute, you find keeping up your streak rewarding in itself. After years of successfully meeting the terms of the ritual, it would be a shame not to follow through, if nothing else to prove that it doesn’t work. And on the off-chance it does....

The off-chance it does becomes more urgent on the day everything changes. As the world learns to cower under the watchful gaze of the sky and Elias Bouchard (and Jonathan Sims) alike, it’s a tiny bit of hope and, if nothing else, a soothing habit that you’re not forced to stop when Annabelle Cane finds out about it, even after—well, that’s another story.


End file.
